10 ms·

Linux is the perpetual scapegoat. They selected a middleware, Coherent UI, that didn't work properly on anything but Windows. They also didn't make proper use

• zeroname 8y ago
  I think you're in denial. If developers need to get this, that and the other thing right specifically for Linux, but it's still only 0.1% of sales, then it's just not worth doing - even if there aren't any bugs.
  • dejaime 8y ago
    I agree with you that it is definitely not commercially worth it. But I guess you missed his point. He is not saying that "it was worth it for this game if well implemented", but that this game is actually a really bad example of how gaming on Linux is. It is like analyzing PC gaming by looking at Devil May Cry 3 or Resident Evil 4...
  • wheelerwj 8y ago
    100% this. source: - am a business person - am a developer - am a linux users - am a linux gamer I love the idea of being able to game and work/dev on the same machine. But its not the current reality and its not the reality of the near future. Ive recently settled for macos because even though it doesn't offer optimal solutions for anything, it offers the really nice solutions for everything. I tried linux gaming for years, and Steam really really gave it a strong push. But the truth is, gaming on linux is complicated and doesn't offer the same experience as on Windows or even macos. I'd rather my favorite studios and developers dedicate its linux resources to customers that pay instead.
    • fb03 8y ago
      I keep a dualboot system because of the current situation. Linux for "real work" Windows for gaming (no-frills setup) and music production (much easier and less clunky low latency setup, way more availability of free synths etc) I absolutely adore Linux for everything it has done to my career but I cannot drop my Windows system yet.
      • halbritt 8y ago
        I likewise run and prefer a Linux desktop and boot into Windows for the occasional gaming foray. Also, to run stuff like Fusion 360. I have to say that even on Windows, driver stability leaves much to be desired (for Nvidia in my case).
        • kaybe 8y ago
          The thing is, if you only boot into Windows occasionally, you'll have to wait for updates about every time you use it. That's pretty annoying and has actually stopped me from doing it at some point.
          • EamonnMR 8y ago
            I don't think I realized it until you mentioned it, but I think I'm in the same boat with my dual-boot box. Doubly so because it's a laptop and half of the time I only have phone-teathered internet.
        • fb03 8y ago
          > I have to say that even on Windows, driver stability leaves much to be desired (for Nvidia in my case). I agree. That is why I tend to leave my Windows box really bare. It has Steam with some 4-5 games on it and my Music Production Software. Every other endeavor is tackled in Linux.
      • balls187 8y ago
        Take a look at cloud9 for your real work :)
  • michaelmrose 8y ago
    In general you are actually looking at 2% of your potential user base not 0.1%.
  • rkido 8y ago
    This is a question of margins, so you're neither right nor wrong. It normally isn't just 0.1% of sales when developers do get everything right, although whether or not the usual 1-5% of sales is worth it depends on the particular game, budget, and sales numbers. Linux support clearly wasn't worth it for Planetary Annihilation due to its low sales numbers, but a game with (1) high sales and (2) easy porting process would be leaving money on the table not to support Linux.
• simias 8y ago
  Technically speaking I'm sure you're right. In practice it doesn't really matter though, if they did it that way it's either because it was easier or because that's the way they were used to doing it. The fact that "technically" it's not Linux's fault doesn't really matter, unless you're more interested in the moral concept of guilt rather that the practicalities of making a Linux port of a game. Why should they change the way they develop games for 0.1% of their sales? So that they'd get kudo "clean code" points from people on HN? Most for-profit software cares very little about that, and for good reasons. Gaming on Linux sucks because Linux is not popular for gaming. Linux is not popular for gaming because gaming on Linux sucks. That's the root of the issue.
  • jimmy1 8y ago
    > Why should they change the way they develop games for 0.1% of their sales? Have you seen how tight the gaming market has become? You need a niche to get any attention. Coming out with a truly cross platform game that has Linux as a first class citizen would buy tremendous free publicity. It would be on the front page here a lone, a site with an enormous audience at minimum once a quarter. It would appear in countless tech related subreddits, twitter hacker-verse would take off. The “maker culture” would adopt it as its son or daughter. Sounds like a tremendous opportunity. We are not representative of the culture but we are hackers and developers and eventually one spark is all you need to start a fire. I have the perception that gamers are dying to get off of Windows, but I could be wrong, I certainly was when I was a gamer.
    • tcd 8y ago
      > would buy tremendous free publicity. That would not buy food on the table. Most money comes from Windows and what games should be optimized for. See r/choosingbeggars for more entertaining stories on the "value" of "publicity".
      • JAlexoid 8y ago
        Choosing beggars literally think that publicity is payment enough. Linux gamers PAY. Really a big difference.
• smileybarry 8y ago
  He points out that a very large percentage of the crashes were graphics driver related, not dependency issues that would be solved by the Steam runtime.
  • rkido 8y ago
    I mention the Steam runtime because this affects the Linux version to this day: I am unable to launch the game (on a fully supported system and OS, mind you) without deleting some files from their install. > He points out that a very large percentage of the crashes were graphics driver related This was still largely related to the Coherent UI middleware and the strange way it was being used, as other posts have noted.
    • vetrom 8y ago
      My gaming box is still Xenial while all my work machines are at least bionic. While btrfs and my personal system setup practices make it easy to test and also port setups from machine to machine, I'm not relishing the moment when I'll have to bite the bullet and upgrade.
• fixermark 8y ago
  But if the set of best practices that works for your target hardware platform is narrow-band, that set itself can severely constrain the set of game houses that can develop for that platform.
• stcredzero 8y ago
  Most games don't make these mistakes...it seems they weren't aware of some other best practices. I see this time and time again. Game developer runs into one of the difficult subjects in computer science/programming. Dismisses the difficulty. Gets themselves into trouble. Blames the library/product/platform. The last time I was at a game jam, I found myself explaining generational garbage collection to a game dev. He then proceeded to "solve" all of his problems by writing a 5 minute hack to ensure all of his objects would be collected as quickly as possible. Which didn't work, because the lifespan of his objects is dependent on gameplay, so he can't ensure all of his objects will die in Eden. I kept trying to explain that he should actually hold onto his objects (especially bullets in his bullet hell game) and recycle them as much as possible, so that he would reduce memory pressure and have those objects promoted to old space, so they are looked at less often. I see this sort of thing time and time again.
  • ThrowawayR2 8y ago
    > I see this time and time again. Game developer runs into one of the difficult subjects in computer science/programming. Dismisses the difficulty. Gets themselves into trouble. Blames the library/product/platform. Members of this particular team worked on the highly acclaimed Total Annihilation (1997) and Supreme Commander (2007) so inexperience or lack of technical expertise seems unlikely to be the cause here.
    • politician 8y ago
      Parts of PA are brilliant, absolutely brilliant. The team pulled off some incredible feats: - In a 16-player game, each player can operate thousands of units across multiple planets orbiting a star, and afterwards, you can replay the match exactly within your own copy of the game. - The planets themselves were mobile battlefields which could be destroyed, moved, and weaponized. - The path-finding for those thousands of units crashing into an opposing army of thousands of units is smooth and there isn't total chaos on the field. But the team also made some really questionable bets that ultimately doomed the title. - Then, for some reason, they used an out-of-proc UI compositor to draw the 2D elements that would fork one process per layer IIRC and drop interaction events, and broke the tool that the players use to interact with the wonderful simulation. - Then, for some worse reason, they launched it like this, and reaped the terrible early reviews that doomed the title. Even after patches resolved the issues, the long-term damage was done.
• sephoric 8y ago
  From the article: > "We eventually laid out a guide with known good versions of Linux and graphics drivers, but it didn't matter. Part of the allure of Linux is the customizability, so few actually stuck to it, and generally wanted to run the game on older hardware we didn't support." It seems that it's because Linux users are unwilling to upgrade their hardware. From a philosophical standpoint, I agree with them, we shouldn't need to buy a new computer every 3-5 years, it's very wasteful and I am very against planned obsolescence and perceived obsolescence. That said, I can see the benefits of writing code to work on the machine you have in front of you, and not doubling your QA work by testing it on older machines that no longer even receive OS upgrades.
  • mrguyorama 8y ago
    I bought PA early, and tried playing it on a low end 2007 laptop, and it was almost playable. The same machine could only barely handle supcom on lowest settings anyway. Meaning, if your hardware could handle supcom well, then it could probably handle the basics of PA (at least that's my bet) They should not be expected to support systems that could only kind of handle the previous game anyway
• politician 8y ago
  Saw "Coherent UI" in your comment and thought, "I bet it's Planetary Annihilation" and was not disappointed. The dev team struggled to get Coherent UI working on Windows, to say nothing of Linux. They switched to Coherent UI late in the development cycle and the beta/launch was constantly glitched out. The problem with trying to run an out-of-proc UI renderer within a game loop were so numerous -- the game would frequently lock up in full screen with multiple instances of the Coherent UI render process running if you managed to escape. ... in Windows, not in Linux. For fans of TA and SupCom, early PA was terrible. Later, the team worked through a lot of the issues, but the damages to their finances (and reviews) were done and PA never got the e-sports league it deserved.
  • mrguyorama 8y ago
    Truth be told I don't think PA ever had a chance to truly be big. So few people wanted the Supcom style gameplay. Forged Alliance Forever only has a couple thousand people and the best or second best commentator/stream of games (Gyle) gets only a few thousand views per video. I think the gameplay style just doesn't appeal to as many people